This
brief essay was included in the back of the programme book for the concert at St
George’s Brandon Hill, Bristol that included the first performance of
Gwyn Pritchard’s large-scale piano work: “Raum Greift Aus”. The audience
was invited to read it only after the performance.

The
one the birds plunge through’s not that trusty space
where each confided form’s intensified.
(Out there in the open you’re self-denied,
and go on vanishing without a trace.)

Space
spreads transposingly from us to things:
really to feel the way a tree upsprings,
cast round it space from that which inwardly
expands in you.Surround it
with retention.
It has no bounds.Not till
its reascension
in your renouncing is it truly tree.

When
it comes to new works there is, it seems to me, a problem with programme notes.Perhaps because reading them in advance of hearing the music to which
they relate they inevitably filter, to some extent, the experience of listening
to the music itself; and frequently any connections between the music and the
composer’s notes about it appear tenuous to say the least.The simplest solution to the problem would, of course, be to have no
notes at all.And yet music so often provokes speculation about the context
of its creation that to remain consistently silent about one’s own music, when
listeners’ curiosity may be raised by it, strikes me as being somewhat
uncooperative.

As
the composer I know, of course, exactly where I started, exactly what it was
that preoccupied me sufficiently to compel me to set to work on the music,
exactly what I thought I wanted to explore.But the very process of working on a piece can transform a composer’s
perception of those initial ideas to such an extent that it can be difficult to
make any definitive comment about the music until the experiences gained in the
process of composing it (not to mention hearing it) have been thoroughly
digested - and that can take some time.From
this perspective I can only furnish the listener with some of the thoughts that
have occurred to me after writing the piece, and in response to it;
effectively entering any debate about the music only as an equal contributor to
a speculative discourse, not as an authority on it.In short, being the composer of a piece of music does not
necessarily put one in a position to make unequivocal statements about it.

Raum Greift Aus
had no title until its composition was almost complete, when a remarkably
‘synchronistic’ encounter with a poem by Rilke suddenly crystallised much
that had preoccupied me for some months whilst working on the music.From embarking on the piece with very definite ideas as to what I thought
musical space (my primary interest in this case) really was, I had come to
redefine those ideas on the basis of understandings gained whilst working on the
music.Rilke’s brief poem, both in its content and equally in its
approach to language, was particularly pertinent to those newly gained
understandings.It was not,
however, simply saying the same things in a different way.If it were I would have abandoned the piece there and then.What really struck me about the poem was firstly its concernwith a kind of ‘relativity’ of space (in a philosophical sense), and
secondly the extent to which that concept, metaphorically, penetrates deeply
into the subtle and complex issues of experience and understanding,
particularly when it comes to music or poetry (but equally, of course, any of
the other arts).

A
literal translation of “Raum greift aus uns und übersetzt die Dinge” might
be something like “Space grasps out of us and translates things”; but J B
Leishman’s ‘poetic’ translation above gets far closer to the implied
meaning of the German original.The
problem is that we are dealing with a poetic and philosophical idea, so any
translation is bound to be also a translation of meaning to some extent.For Rilke words have to work, to reach far beyond their more prosaic
meanings, and through their redeployment in unlikely combinations and contexts
become a means of articulating ideas that constitute an unfamiliar, but
nonetheless very real, experienceable world.

To
some extent notes can be like that too.Although
assemblages of notes can never have the specific intended meanings that words
and sentences do, they can certainly be made to work and to reach beyond the
audibility of their structure, allowing us unfamiliar experiences of things we
might take for granted: of time, of intensity, of density and of space, for
example. Paradoxically perhaps, in music (as with the syntax of Rilke’s
poetry) this can only happen because those audible structures, those defined,
tangible relationships of pitches and rhythms, are there in the first place.The illumination of elusive ideas and experiences can only be achieved by
a process which starts with concepts that are graspable, already anchored in our
understanding.Superficial notions of transcendence are not enough. In
that sense the creative process, whether musical or literary, is in itself a
form of translation - the structure of experience becomes translated into the
structure of sounds or words; and that experience is so intimately tied to its
precise form of representation that to effect that is to effect its
‘meaning’, and consequently also the listener’s or reader’s experience
of it.

Of
course listeners to a new piece of music are only given that agglomeration of
audible structures, and can know little, if anything, of the experiences that
lie behind them (even taking into account programme notes attempting to
contextualise them in some way).It
would certainly be naïve to imagine that the average (or even specialist)
audience can somehow spontaneously and intuitively grasp the raison d’être of
all they hear; and yet, by way of a further process of translation, the listener
may ‘surround it with retention’,
allowing its ‘reascension’ until
it is ‘truly’ a piece of music: the one of their own experience!The
striking point about this is that listening becomes an intensely active and
creative process, and that the alternative, in the presence of music, is to be ‘self-denied,
and go on vanishing without a trace’ (something which, in these times, an
alarming amount of music almost seems to encourage).

And
so, from the initial impact of Rilke’s text and its relevance to my concern
with musical space, in taking him at his word and ‘casting my own space’
around his poem, I find its sphere of relevance far greater than I had at first
suspected; and the outcome of that is to be left wondering how far music can
equally contain within itself the key to its own ‘translation’ processes,
both those before and after its structural composition.For to translate something, be it in the usual sense oftranslating from one language to another, or more subtly, the translation
of experience into music or words (or conversely music or words into
experience), must be, in all cases, both to remain faithful to that which is
being translated and at the same time create something out of it.